Work Song, part two: a Vision

by Wendell Berry

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it...
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides...
The river will run
clear, as we will never know it...
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields...
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.

The Red Carpet Four... plus, Greenpeace makes it easy for you to make a mizvot for the earth

A little bit of info about four of the activists still in prison in Copenhagen. I was impressed with this video -- it's short, well-done, and potent. They were arrested as they entered the Queen's dinner with all of the heads of states and unfurled Greenpeace banners from beneath their formal attire.





Here's an easy way to plug into Climate Justice Action, courtesy of Green Peace. It takes all of ten seconds but makes your day feel sparkly and good because you just did a mizvah for the whole planet.

Something's Rotten in Denmark...

(Statement from those still imprisoned after Copenhagen)

While I sit in my living room, comfy at home with a kitty on my lap and another sitting next to me, there are still people in Copenhagen in jail. Here's a statement from them... impressive... powerful... but a bit sad as well.

The most powerful part for me: "We are detained with evidently absurd accusations about either violences that actually did not take place or conspiracies and organizing of law-breaking actions." When Jason and I went to the RNC, we were originally attacked and arrested for a conspiracy charge that was later thrown out and forgotten about, as it had absolutely no merit. This is something they've got down to a system, internationally. Yikes. Oh, yikes.

Lotsa love,
R
* * * * *

Something is rotten (but not just) in Denmark. As a matter of fact, thousands of people have been considered, without any evidence, a threat to the society. Hundreds have been arrested and some are still under detention, waiting for judgement or under investigation. Among them, us, the undersigned. We want to tell the story from the peculiar viewpoint of those that still see the sky from behind the bars.

A UN meeting of crucial importance has failed because of several contradictions and tensions that have shown up during the COP15. The primary concern of the powerfuls was the governance of the energy supply for neverending growth. This was the case whether they were from the overdeveloped world, like the EU countries or the US, or from the so-called developing countries, like China or Brazil.

At odds, hundreds of delegates and thousands of people in the streets have raised the issue that the rationale of life must be (and actually is) opposed to that of profit. we have strongly affirmed our will to stop anthropic pressure on the biosphere.

A crisis of the energy paradigm is coming soon. The mechanism of the global governance have proven to be overhelmingly precarious. The powerfuls failed not only in reaching an agreement on their internal equilibrivre but also in keeping the formal control of the discussion.

Climate change is an extreme and ultimate expression of the violence of the capitalistic growth paradigm. People globally are increasingly showing the willingness of taking the power to rebel against that violence. we have seen that in Copenhagen, as well as we have seen that same violence. Hundreds of people have been arrested without any reason or clear evidence, or for participating in peacefull and legitimate demonstrations. Even mild examples of civil disobedience have been considered as a serious threath to the social order.

In response we ask - What order do we threaten and who ordered it? Is it that order in which we do not anymore own our bodies? The order well beyond the terms of any reasonable "social contract" that we would ever sign, where our bodies can be taken, managed, constrained and imprisoned without any serious evidence of crime. Is it that order in which the decision are more and more shielded from any social conflicts? Where the governance less and less belongs to people, not even through the parliament? As a matter of fact, non-democratic organisms like the WTO, the NB, the G-whatever rule beyond any control.

We are forced to notice that the theater of democracy is a broken one as soon as one approaches the core of the power. That is why we reclaim the power to the people. We reclaim the power over our own lives. Above all, we reclaim the power to counterpose the rationale of life and of the commons to the rationale of profit. It may have been declared illegal, but still we consider it fully legitimate.

Since no real space is left in the broken theater, we reclaimed our collective power - Actually we expected it - to speak about the climate and energy issues. Issues that, for us, involve critical nodes of global justice, survival of man and energy independence. We did marching with our bodies.

We prefer to enter the space where the power is locked dancing and singing. We would have liked to do this at the Bella center, to disrupt the session in accord with hundreds of delegates. But we were, as always, violently hampered by the police. They arrested our bodies in an attempt to arrest our ideas. we risked our bodies, trying to protect them just by staing close to each other. We value our bodies: We need them to make love, to stay together and to enjoy life. They hold our brains, with beautifull bright ideas and views. They hold our hearts filled with passion and joy. Nevertheless, we risked them. we risked our bodies getting locked in prisons.

In fact, what would be the worth of thinking and feeling if the bodies did not move? Doing nothing, letting-it-happen, would be the worst form of complicity with the business that wanted to hack the UN meeting. At the COP15 we moved, and we will keep moving.

Exactly like love, civil dosibedience can not just be told. We must make it, with our bodies. Otherwise, we would not really think about what we love, and we would not really love what we think about. It's as simple as that. It's a matter of love, justice and dignity.

How the COP15 has ended proves that we were right. Many of us are paying what is mandatory for an obsessive, pervasive and total repression: To find a guilty at the cost of inventing it (along with the crime perhaps).

We are detained with evidently absurd accusations about either violences that actually did not take place or conspiracies and organizing of law-breaking actions.

We do not feel guilty for having shown, together with thousands, the reclamation of the independence of our lives from profit's rule. If the laws oppose this, it was legitimate to peacefully - but still conflictually - break them.

We are just temporarily docked, ready to sail again with a wind stronger than ever. It's a matter of love, justice and dignity.

Luca Tornatore - from the Italien social centres network "see you in Copenhagen"
Natasha Verco - Climate Justice Action
Stine Gry Jonassen - Climate Justice Action
Tannie Nyboe - Climate Justice Action
Johannes Paul Schul Meyer
Arvip Peschel
Christian Becker
Kharlanchuck Dzmitry
Cristoph Lang
Anthony Arrabal

Copenhagen: Final thoughts... for now.

Hello dear friends, and happy christmas eve to those celebrating this day!

The other day I went to Solstice on the beach, where I was reunited with my commuity for the first time since returning from Copenhagen. It felt so wonderfully warm, even plunging into the December waters of Ocean Beach, to be so held and received with kind words and attention. People were careful not to overwhelm me (we’d just gotten off of the plane at midnight the day before), but overall, there was one question that seemed to be on everyone’s mind: what did I think about the summit, going forward? Was it a success or a failure?

The question kinda stumped me at first, not because I haven’t been thinking about it incessantly since the end of the summit, but because I think there are so many people more qualified to give that diagnosis than I am. I’m not a political expert, and there are many people in this community who are much more informed than I am. I listen to my Democracy Now in the mornings are read the Nation now and again, but I don’t feel like politics is something that I study. Beyond that, I rather feel, for the most part, that its impossible to really know how one moment in time fits into the larger web until we look back decades later. All of that aside, getting the question again and again helped me refine how I was feeling about the whole thing, going forward.

A friend of mine posted on my Facebook page, “I hope you enjoyed the sites in Copenhagen, since the rest of what happened there was a complete flop,” or something to that effect. This friend, actually, is one of the people I mentioned above – someone who is much more informed than I am. But, even so, I must respectfully disagree. I don’t feel like it was a total flop, nor do I feel the overwhelming disappointment many of my fellow American activist brothers and sisters seem to feel in Obama. Perhaps that’s because I never believed he would go to Copenhagen there are promise a reduction to pre-1995 levels of CO2 emissions or that he’d promise hundreds of billions in reparations to the G-77 nations.

What happened in Copenhagen seems to me to be what usually happens at any major negotiation: a bunch of people got together with a common goal that they want to achieve while each attempts to maintain their place (or advance it) in the pecking order as a whole. Obama, like all the leaders of the world, wants to help heal climate change, but not at the cost of the financial wellbeing of his country, which in our current model is completely relational to the financial wellbeing of other countries.

There’s both the happy and the sad in the final outcome of the conference. The happy is that they don’t seem to be talking about Cap & Trade as the end-all-be-all solution anymore, and the industrialized nations do seem to understand that they have a role to play in paying for the developing nations to skip all of those dirty technologies that we employed while rising to the top. The quickly-developing nations seem to realize that their growth must be tempered by what the planet can sustain. America, the grossest polluter in the world, is finally taking a role in the international negotiations around climate change – rather than continuing to deny the science behind it. And yours truly had the opportunity to march with an amazing samba band for hours every day, learn about European political organizing, and be a part of something that overall was personally very fulfilling and amazing to witness.

The sad is that although we could be well on our way to solving the problem tomorrow if we wanted to, we’re not going to (if the US, for example, simply reallocated its defense budget for one year, we’d have all of the clean technologies we need and the money to pay people to install it all). It’s also sad that our global leaders have decided that a 2 degree Celsius rise in temperature is acceptable. Perhaps they simply found it inevitable at this point. Who can say?

Although I make myself out to be rational and realistic, there was a part of me that dreamed that Obama would go in there and say something truly revolutionary to protect the earth, make grandiose promises in line with my own dreams for the earth. But even if he had, he’d be lying. He doesn’t have the power to fulfill those kinds of promises just by saying that’s what will be – its our congress that makes those kinds of decisions, at least, for now. He could promise the world, but in the end, without congress on board, it would all be just a lot of hot air.

Here’s the part that you might not like.

When Obama was elected, he was very clear: there are a lot of changes that we need to make on the horizon, changes that he wanted to make, but in order to make them happen he needed us “to make him do it.” Although some would argue that the rhetoric around Obama’s victory being a win that came from grassroots organizing was simply that – rhetoric – I think there was something undeniable about the way that he mobilized people to work for creating the change they wanted to see in the world. But since then, especially around the issue of climate change, what have we done? Are we “making him” address this crisis the way we want him to?

I don’t think that we are. Two weeks ago I went to two supporting actions leading up to the Copenhagen summit in the Bay Area: one in San Francisco on November 30th, the anniversary of the shutdown of the WTO in Seattle, and one a week later at the Chevron corporate offices in San Ramon. Although spritely and passionate, neither action was notably well-attended. In fact, they were both much smaller than I had envisioned, especially the one in San Francisco. San Francisco, where were you when we were out in the streets, trying to let the Powers That Be know how deeply concerned we are about climate change, how much we want our nation to do its part in the global dialogue about it? In London, 20,000 people came out (a conservative estimate – it was 40,000 by some estimates) the day that Copenhagen started. There were more people who live in our area and who went to Seattle ten years ago then the number that came out to voice their desire and conviction in the streets.

I know that direct action isn’t the only want to act for climate justice (or any other issue) and that many of us do different things all the time to try and be a part of the healing of this earth. What I want us to ask ourselves, however, is whether or not the things we are doing are things that Obama could in any way know about. If I go to the store and buy energy-efficient light bulbs, is that something that is likely to be a part of “public outcry” about climate change? If I donate to the Sierra Club, how sure am I that some of that money goes to a campaign out climate change? In other words, how are our actions “making” Obama and our congresspeople address this issue in a way that will be truly transformational, powerful, ground-breaking -- in other words, effective?

One of the things I realized in Europe is how repressed we in the United States are, certainly by our police forces, but also by our culture. In Europe, the radical left is not nearly as marginalized and disregarded as it is here. It is regarded as a valid political force, just as any other. When I’m here, I often hear a lot of questions about political action and its value, such as “Why would I bother going out there in the streets? It doesn’t make a difference, anyway. It’s just a bunch of vain, futile yelling.” I can’t imagine that anyone would question whether or not the civil rights movement or the suffragists were wasting their time out there in the streets. So I don’t understand why its so different with climate change? The only thing that I can come up with is remembering the way the oil companies and other big corporations were able to manufacture doubt about climate change for years, calling it a “controversy” when there was none, and I wonder if the same thing is happening with civil disobedience as a whole.

I know many people think to themselves, “But, I’m not an activist like Riyana.” The truth of the matter is, it’s only in the last couple of months that I’ve begun to feel any comfort at all with that label as a part of my identity. For a long time, I didn’t consider myself an activist even when everyone else was referring to me that way, and I certainly don’t see myself doing anything that everyone else couldn’t do. But beyond that, I don’t need others to do what I’m doing. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground – and to fight for climate justice. Many of them are much less glamorous and much more effective than going to a big protest once or twice a year. I totally salute the people that work tirelessly, day in and day out, for what they believe in – at nonprofits, through political art, as teachers and organizers. I think the many ways we engage in this issue, as long as they are effective, passionate, and most of all, conspicuous, fold together and merge into one thing – into one movement, a powerful and diverse force for change.

I heard a story recently about a woman who started to take one day off a week to make soup for homeless people in her community. At some point, people started to hear about what she was doing, and they began sending in donations to help her with her work. Every time, she sat down and took the time to handwrite the person a letter in response. They’d come home and find it in the mail, and when they opened it, their own check would fall into their laps, along with a short note: “Make your own damn soup.”

Now, that’s a bit more harsh than how I’m feeling, and believe me, we very much appreciate the many people who contributed financially and energetically to our work. But I do hope that my posts about Copenhagen have helped to activate some of you to find your own way to be a part of this movement, because I think that what we need in these times is public outcry. Next year, when the COP 16 (UN Climate Change Summit) will be held in Mexico City. What will you do in the next 365 days that will help “make” Obama speak more powerfully, with the true authority that comes with being backed fully by his people, about what we’re willing to do to help save the earth and her people? What will we as a people do? Who will join us in the streets, and write letters, and sign petitions, and fundraise for non-profits that actively work for climate justice, and boycott Chevron, and all of the things that need to be done now? And when it comes to that time, will you join us in Mexico City? Will you rise up in the streets of San Francisco, or wherever you live? What will you do to be part of the earth rising?

Rising, rising, the earth is rising;
Turning, turning the tide is turning.

In love and solidarity,
Riyana

Dear Leaders of the World: From the COP15 website

It's okay. The younger generation does not need you.  There is no need to seal the deal since you are inherently incapable of doing so.

We will fight our own wars.
Decades later, you will be long gone.
So when the ultimate doom comes, we will fight on our own.

We will never let go of hope, and for every living second we will struggle on, until we perish as Earth does.  And we will remember it's your generation that failed us all. 

--JY Abron


(PS - Just in case it's not obvious, yours truly did not write this. I was simply touched by it and decided to pass it along. In love and solidarity, R)

Pushing for Climate Justice

The night before last malignant forces attempted to sabotage our big action yesterday. Jason and I went over to the Rag space for the Rhythms of Resistance meeting, having fully assimilated ourselves into their group for this week and finally accepting that fate. We'd been invited to their evening meeting various times during the week, but weren't necessarily as excited to meet as we were to drum; but now, with the most critical demonstration of our entire time out here, it seemed like we couldn't resist any longer. And really, all joking aside, we wanted to be involved in the planning of what our group was going to be doing -- not only because we wanted to help co-create it, but in my case, because I needed to know what level of confrontation the sambatistas were planning to go for.

Here's my little secret, one that by admitting I will forever degrade any reputation I had of being a hardcore activist: when things get hot, I can't handle it. I'm afraid of fighting with the cops: I don't want to have my arm, or wrist, or ankle broken by a billy club. I'm afraid of being pepper sprayed: every time I've seen it happen to someone, it looks like its really terribly painful. And, I'm afraid of finding myself in some cloud of chaos that invovles tear gas and crowds of stampeding people, and falling down and being trampled. Over all, the whole energy of that kind of intensity is just too much for me.

So, now you know. I'm actually not hardcore. I'm softcore. I like to go out to these things, play a drum, chant, even yell a bit, and then go back to where its safe and warm and police free.

In the past, this has made it occasionally difficult for Jason and I to be buddies at actions, because Jason is actually hardcore. He doesn't get afraid. He is always calm, strong, and present to what's happening, just like he looks. He wants to stay in the fray when the fray happens (up to a point), not to be violent, but also not willing to back down in the face of tactics that involve pain and terror to get us to comply. The Samba band, this week, has shown a similar attitude towards their interactions with the police, which is tempered by the large surdu drums that some drummers carry that make it fairly hard to run away at the last minute.

Anyway, I was very interested to see what level of confrontation the sambatistas were planning for the Reclaim the Power Action. The action was going to be divided into several "blocs" of people, roughly categorized by the kinds of things they'd be doing during the action, which has a connection to the kind of violence from the police you might be subject to but does not directly translate as such.

The Blue Bloc was those people who were marching along the police approved route, including a large contingent of folks from the Global South at the front who were going to push through the police line, a wave of tightly pressed together folks right behind them to continue pushing, a line of various affinity groups chained together by interlocked arms around the edge of the entire thing, a truck with a sound system to issue instructions to the crowd, and, potentially, the samba band. The Green Bloc was a mobile group leaving from a nearby train station that would move down a different route towards the Bella Center, and enter it by some other means. There was a bloc of autonomous groups that were planning to attempt to tear down the fences, create distracting actions for the police, and swim across the canals. There was a Bike Bloc that would be offering support to the other blocs, going were needed. There was also a group from Chistania, which had been brutally raided by the police the night before, who were planning on going into downtown in the morning and breaking lots of crap as retribution. The Chistania group wasn't really a part of the action; they were just a bunch of angry kids trying to get back at the police, loosely affiliated with us.

After much discussion, the Sambas decided to agree to the request by the action organizers to join the Blue Bloc and help direct the energy of people there. They also agreed to stay on the police-approved route unless the cops stopped the march prematurely, at which point they were holding the option of breaking off and heading to the BC by an alternate open route.

The whole time we were at the meeting, I kept looking out the window, waiting for the police to show up. As I mentioned, the night before they had raided Chistania and held everyone inside for hours, using tear gas and dogs while residents threw glass bottles at them and barricaded the gates. Once in a while, we'd see one or two blue Politi trucks pull up, but they’d just leave again.

Eventually, Jason and I headed back to the hostel. We took Lisa with us, as some of the other more public organizers were having their homes raided or had been arrested, and she was worried they’d show up at her place and drag her away if she stayed there that night.

That’s when the malignant forces struck, taking us entirely by surprise. The first was a fellow in the bed across the room from us, who snored loudly. I keep trying to think of a way to tell you how loudly, but can’t think of anything. Loud enough that there was no way to sleep, at any rate. Possibly loud enough to be heard several rooms over. We took turns going over to him and nudging him gently, but all that did was provide a couple of minutes respite before the barrage began again. Just as I’d be falling into the drugged-feeling doze that was substituting for real sleep that night, he’d begin again. SNORE. SNORE. SNOOOOOOR-RE-RE.

The second malignant force is the doddering old man in the bed nearest ours that stayed up until after midnight packing and repacking his small duffle bag, and then who woke up again sometime around four to do it yet again, before going back to sleep. He claimed to need to be up early for a flight, but we found him at breakfast the next morning when we went down, so it obviously wasn’t all that early.

The lack of sleep was killing us. We grumbled, we groaned, we heard our frustration echoing in the tossing and turning of our other hostel-mates. Tomorrow was the biggest action of the week, and we were being subtly undone by two hapless roommates.

At some point, while Jason and I were quietly trying to convince one another that it was the other person’s turn to get up and deal with the snorer (what also didn’t help the potential for sleep was the fact that we were sharing the lower part of a twin-sized bunk bed, so Lisa could have the top bunk), he suddenly jumped out of bed, strode over to the snorer, and said loudly, “You. Have. Got. To. Stop. Snoring. NOW.”

I wanted to groan outloud. Everyone knows that snorers can’t help their snoring… that’s what makes the whole situation so terrible. All he’d done, I thought, was to further irritate our roommates.

But the snoring stopped.

Jason sank back into bed beside me. I couldn’t believe it. I laid there with my eyes open, waiting for the snoring to begin again. It did, but more quietly. And soon after it began, the snorer woke himself up and turned over. Just like that. I tell you what, that man is magic. I couldn’t believe it had worked.

We were nonetheless all very groggy the next morning when we woke up at 5:30AM to head down to Tanby station, where the Samba band was meeting the rest of the Blue Block. Tom had volunteered to be one of the Samba “Angels” or “Engines,” two equally illogical words to describe the people marching alongside the samba band with linked arms to protect the band from cops and other interloping elements.

I drank a mocha in the morning to help me with my sleepiness, and that, couple with the fact that I was still feeling quite nervous about the potential for police violence this day, made for a jumpy and antsy Riyana that had to take frequent (and growingly more and more inconvenient) trips to the little activists’s room. Jason seemed simply excited, like most of the band. We gathered together and formed our lines, and sooner than I would have thought possible, we were marching down the street with a couple hundred more folks… perhaps just under one thousand.

The police marched next to us, a line of cops and a line of trucks on the side facing the Bella Center, like a wall. We just kept going. They were clearly intent on stopping any break away marches going off in that direction. We just kept going. The sound system truck, with Lisa on it, was behind us. They were the ones who were going to direct the push when it was time. Until then, it was just drumming and chanting and cops, like usual.

We got down to the Bella Center quickly, but I couldn’t see much of it or what was going on up ahead. I knew that the Green Bloc, the more mobile of the two large blocs of activist, was supposed to be doing something somewhere near us, but I hadn’t seen one glimpse or heard anything about them the entire morning. I also knew that Via Campesina and many of the more militant European activsts were up at the front of the march preparing to head the push through the police lines into the Bella Center, and that there were hundreds of NGO and other delegates inside that were going to be pushing out to meet us, but I couldn’t see any of that. All I could see was the band around me surrounded by the police, and all I could feel was the pulsing of the samba music matching beats with the strong erratic stammering of my heart. There seemed to be no Green Bloc, and no flood of Bella Center attendees coming out to meet us.

A woman got on the mike and told us it was time for us to push for Climate Justice, and that we were going to be moving slightly to the left and forward, through the police lines. I tried to imagine this happening – both to visualize our success, and to get a sense of what she meant. I imagined people pushing through the lines of the cops and ducking under their arms as I had in the march the other day, easily, like salmon flowing through the rocks in the riverbeds as they move upstream.

Jason frowned, watching the cops, who had heard the woman and were now moving to buffer the left side of the march in response. “Why on earth are they announcing it over the loud system?” he asked. “That’s no way to get this done.”

I didn’t understand, either, unless they simply thought that getting everyone on the same page was worth a few extra cops in the way. Still, it didn’t really make sense. At these big events, our biggest assets are our unpredictability and ability to move without waiting for commands, without leaders, like swarming fish. But we weren’t doing that – we were packing in tightly, creating a wedge, and we were also announcing it to the police.

“Get ready – it’s almost time!” the woman yelled. “We’re going to push! Push! PUSH!”

I prepared myself to move forward, towards the gate – but suddenly, I wasn’t moving forward but to the left, very much to the left, propelled forward by all of the people behind me. Jason was next to me. He grabbed my shoulder so that we wouldn’t be separated with an iron grip, and we both flowed forward with the crowd, straight into the line of cops. My drum was crushed up against me in the tide of people, and there were bodies up against me, too, so much so that I knew it wouldn’t be long before breathing became more difficult. The pressure was like a birthing wave, the contraction that is also the beginning of the opening. I knew that either the dam would burst or that we’d flow back again, flow open. It wasn’t the kind of energy that could be sustained.

And then there was a cry, and a surge, and a person was staggering backwards while other people called all around, “Make way! Make way!” Seconds later, more people were staggering back against the crowd, closing their eyes or covering them. A fine mist rose up from the front ranks where we intersected with them. The cops were using pepper spray.

My heartrate went up again. I hate pepper spray, have hated it ever since I first saw someone rolling around on the ground who’d been hit in St. Paul.

The crowd surged forward again, threatening to pull Jason and I apart, but he continued to grasp my jacket sleeve tightly. “Don’t fall!” he said. “Watch your feet! I’ve got you.”

Still the crowd pushed in on all sides, and the rim of my drum cut into my leg. I raised it higher so that it would help create some space around me, taking tiny little steps in order to keep my balance in the tumultuous surge of people. The cops were still holding firm, and as we got closer, I could see that they were pressed up against the trucks that had been behind them, and that behind that, there was a fence. A line of cops, a line of police trucks, and a fence. How on earth were we going to do this?

In fact, I realized, I couldn’t do it. It simply was too much.

I leaned over to Jason and told him that this wasn’t the place for me. He nodded, “This is where we are, though, so this is where I’m staying,” he said.

It used to be that I absolutely couldn’t leave Jason during these heated moments. After the RNC, the idea of leaving him and having something happen to him was too terrible. But just before coming here to Copenhagen, I had a dream where an ancient grandmother came to me and told me that Jason and I had important, yet separate, work to do here. Since then, I’ve been much more able to do what I need and let him have whatever experience he needs.

So, he let me go. Another pepper spray victim was weaving through the crowd, and I took him by the shoulder and started yelling, “Make way!” to help him through, following him out as I did so.

I met up with some more sambatistas at the edge of the crowd, and from this perspective, could see what was happening much better: those people at the front, who had wanted to be in confrontational positions with the cops, were coming up from the right to try and get in to the wedge, while the bulk of the march continued to press in from the left. It was like two rivers streaming into one dammed reservoir, filling it up with people. Still no Green Bloc people, and no one from the inside, though cheers from that direction told me that there were definitely people there trying to get out.

In the end, the police line held. The cops had locked the Bella Center gates and refused to let the delegates walk out, at first threatening them with arrest and then beating them when they still tried to get to us. The Green Bloc people hadn’t even gotten past the train station doors before getting arrested. It was left to only us Blue Block people, and it simply didn’t happen.

The energy was quite intense still, and I had to fall back again, this time wetly crossing one of the canals as the police kettled in the bulk of the crowd. I couldn’t leave Jason, though. We had set up an emergency meeting point nearby, but even that seemed too far away. Instead, I simply waited at the bank of the canal, moving from here to there any time the cops insisted that I do so, but keeping my eye on what was going on the entire time.

After awhile it seemed safe enough to go join up again with the samba group and Jason and Tom, who had never left. The People’s Assembly – a meeting of people from every continent – began, to discuss the issues of global warming and the solutions that we desire. Slowly, the people from inside the Bella Center who had wanted to come out started to join us, having taken a long journey to a train station blocks away and walked over.

Because my feet had gotten wet in the canal crossing, however, I couldn’t stay long. I felt disheartened and disappointed, anyway: disheartened because yet again I found that I wasn’t able to stick it out when the going got tough and disappointed because I had really, really wanted us to be able to get through the gates and meet the people from inside. It felt like it could have been a Rosa Parks kinda moment, one with that kind of historical power. I wasn’t able to see, in that moment, that had we actually gotten into the Bella Center, things might have been much worse. The police never would have let us stay there, and their determination to get us out might have made things much more violent. At the very least, there would have been no People’s Assembly. Only a very significant, yet purely symbolic, act.

I went back to the hostel and took a "nap" that turned into an all-nighter. I was exhausted, and I didn’t know what to think anymore. All over the news, the reports were claiming that the entire Copenhagen Climate Summit was falling apart: not only the massive protests in and out, but also that the head of the summit was resigning and more and more countries were walking out and such. As sleep claimed me, my last thoughts were, “Why on earth did I come here again?”

I'm so exhausted...

Trying to get caught up with writing, but really falling-down-sleepy right now.

To tide you over, I give you Amy Goodman's report on what's happening out here.

In better news, many of the CNN and AP stories I've seen about the protests here have actually been incredibly even handed and good about expressing what our message actually is, rather than some sort of butchered, stupified version of it.  I've been pleased.

Good night!